The Phenomic AI team

Creative Destruction Lab puts cancer detection start-up on road to success

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Phenomic AI has raised $2.25 million in funding

An AI start-up is reaping the benefits of attending the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), which is now open for applications at Oxford Saïd.

Phenomic AI is seeking to transform the pharmaceutical industry by using AI to speed up drug discovery and is focused on developing new treatments for cancer and fibrosis.

Traditionally, this has been done through painstaking human analysis of information such as tumour biopsies. But co-founders, Oren Kraus and Sam Cooper, believe that by applying artificial intelligence they can drastically reduce the time it takes to spot signs of disease and develop new drugs. They have applied deep learning to develop computer vision tools to examine biomedical images in the minutest detail.

Oren and Sam originally met at a workshop at Harvard University in 2016. At the time, Oren was working on a PhD in Machine Learning and Computational Biology at the University of Toronto. Sam was a PhD student with the Department of Computational Medicine at Imperial College London and the Dynamical Cell Systems team at the Institute of Cancer Research.

With so much in common, they kept in touch, and when Phenomic was born in Toronto in 2017, they agreed to develop the company together as co-founders.

Entering the 2017/18 cohort of the CDL programme at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management proved to be a pivotal point for the company.

Founded in 2012, Creative Destruction Lab is a seed-stage mentoring programme for science and technology-focused start-ups. The programme matches participating companies with a carefully selected group of mentors - accomplished entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, and business professors. To date CDL has helped to nurture start-ups worth over £2 billion in equity value.

Oren and Sam spent nine months in the programme, attending five full-day, on-site sessions and achieving set objectives in between.

Breaking into an established industry like pharmaceuticals is tough.

Oren Kraus

The opportunity to connect with investors and learn from other companies at different stages of growth was invaluable for the pair.

‘Access to capital is essential for our research and development,’ says Oren. ‘Having access to the investors in the programme was critical to our subsequent growth. It was impressive that they clearly cared deeply about the success of the companies they invest in.’

Sam continues: ‘We were inspired by the success of other AI powered drug discovery companies like Deep Genomics and Atomwise, who also participated in the programme. One of our biggest learnings was that we needed to move towards a Silicon-valley mindset – in particular, understanding what investors care about. Being in a niche technology space, it was important to articulate our story clearly to wide range of audiences.’

The programme also challenged Sam and Oren to focus on company changes that would make the most impact in their marketplace.

‘Breaking into an established industry like pharmaceuticals is tough. Understanding what excites senior scientists in our market is key,’ says Oren.

‘When we went into the programme, we were focusing on producing software. However, the advice we received through CDL convinced us that we also needed to create more value by running our own biology experiments and generating our own datasets. Pursuing this strategy is allowing us to go after a much bigger therapeutics market and has opened the door for exciting partnerships.’

Phenomic AI now has eleven staff based at two locations in Toronto. And it has attracted Canadian and Silicon Valley venture capital investment from the likes of Inovia, Radical, Cantos and Hemi.

It has just signed a deal with PerkinElmer, Inc., a global corporation focused in the business areas of instruments and software for diagnostics, life science research, food, environmental and industrial testing.

So, what’s next for this ground-breaking company?

‘We are currently kicking off our next funding round, so we are looking for new investment,’ says Sam. ‘And whilst our current focus is on a specific cancer cell type involved in promoting tumour growth and resistance, we will be looking to grow our drug screening capabilities and branch out into other areas of biology.

‘There’s no doubt that the advice and support we received at CDL has been central to where we are today.’

Saïd Business School is now looking for applications from AI-focused companies based in the UK and Europe to join the first CDL-Oxford programme that opens in Oxford in the autumn.

Watch this video for more information about Creative Destruction Lab.

Companies that are interested should apply by 12th August 2019.